"The web giant also wants damages, including all the money made from the scam."
Google: Nobody makes money off the gullibility of our users but us!
225 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2022
No, of course not.
But "did our ads load and show" which is the information they actually *want*, their check of "do you have an ad-blocker" is the wrong way to go about this - isn't that. And I'm worried that if YouTube takes off their Google hat for a minute and does this check without data-slurping, then the law will switch around to being on their side.
So, I think YouTube is doing a stupid here... *but*.
Blocking ads is legal - you're just choosing *not* to download something.
Blocking ad-blockers is also legal - you are allowed to make "View my ads" a condition of viewing the website, and try and enforce that.
Blocking ad-blocker-blockers is *not* legal, as you are now circumventing the "conditions of entry", as it were.
So I think that what YouTube is doing is user-hostile and they should definitely be using content-based advertising and massively ratcheting down the (download) size and interactivity of online ads as other people have said... but I'm worried that if they raise a stink about ad-blockers in a court somewhere, that they'll actually have a leg to stand on.
"Humanoid robots are touted to become the next disruptive thing after computers, smartphones and new energy vehicles"
Assuming they mean electric vehicles, have those actually disrupted anything? I thought the only thing they're a serious threat to would be a petrol station, and even then I'm assuming they'll pivot to being charging stations.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-16/social-media-x-fined-over-gaps-in-child-abuse-prevention/102980590
Quoting directly from there:
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, can now require online service providers to report on how they are meeting any or all of the expectations as part of the eSafety Act.
"This was about the worst kind of harm, child sexual exploitation as well as extortion, and we need to make sure that companies have trust and safety teams, they're using people processes and technologies to tackle this kind of content," she told ABC News Channel.
"Frankly, X did not provide us with the answers to very basic questions we'd ask them like, 'How many trust and safety people do you have left?'"
"What class of apps is Apple blocking that threatens them? I can't think of anything."
According to app store rules, anything that does something that an Apple device does already cannot be an app. Most famously, this means that web browsers cannot be installed via the app store, as they -gasp- might actually prove a superior experience to Safari, which comes installed with the device.
Yes, Chrome and Firefox have apps in the app store, but those aren't browsers - they're thin wrappers around Safari. There is no choice of browser on iOS - it's Safari or nothing. That's why Safari being underpowered is such a problem - another browser cannot just outcompete it, because it can't compete with it period. They've banned browser competition on iOS.
The trouble is that Google is saying there are only two choices: third-party cookies or the privacy sandbox. And between them, the sandbox is better... slightly.
But what the EFF is saying, is that they've left out the choice of "not having targeted ads", which is superior to both by ages.
So police should only ever go after small offenders, as going after major offenders is just going to "make a lot of noise" and "make things worse"?
Yes, other people do this. It's illegal, and should be stopped.
Amazon being a major player who does this makes this *more* important to stop, as it's committing the *actual, literal crime* at a massive scale. If people look at Amazon as normal, why should they not do the same thing? Commit the same crimes?
The minister's goal is that "just as you can't go into a car yard and buy a car that will not be safe to use, when you buy a digital product on sale in our country we know that it's safe for you to use";
I feel like this will be the hardest one of all - given that anything powerful quickly becomes unsafe.
"Oh yeah, I'm sure actively helping the government implement facial recognition of all of its citizens will lead to only good things"
- nobody ever
I'd suggest some kind of WebAuthn alternative, but you can pass those from person to person, so no dice if you want to be sure the person before the keyboard *is* the relevant person. Mind, we have that problem with passwords now, and the world had not collapsed...
I agree with you in principle, but WebAuthn just means that the client has a public/private key pair. Chrome has an emulator for this built in for testing, someone making a fake browser can make fake WebAuthn accounts no problem. "Guaranteeing that the user is real" isn't WebAuthn's purpose - it's making sure it was the same user as last time.
It's not that we have proof that they *are*, it's that we have proof that they *could* - the CCP has passed laws that given themselves those powers. That's apparently enough to make the US gov go *heck no*.
Re: Data in America not being safe, well no. That's why the EU are currently fighting with Google and Facebook in the courts about storing EU citizen data in the US, as they don't consider that secure for many of the same reasons as America is worried about data in China.